


Concrete Jungle

by monster_baby



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Everyone is Dead, M/M, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 10:02:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12579252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monster_baby/pseuds/monster_baby
Summary: John's searching for a familiar face.





	Concrete Jungle

**Author's Note:**

> un-edited. happy halloween. :^)

The night shifts in blurry stops and starts, concrete and grass and mud beneath John’s feet, cold air flooding his lungs, icy wind at his face. It’s dark in intervals. Sometimes, he notices hazily with a glance upwards, there are stars, but for the most part there’s black with the occasional flickering streetlamp. Their poles are bent. Cars have overrun the curbs to smack house fronts and fire hydrants, but he prefers to stumble through the mess of broken sidewalk and glass than navigate the mess of the streets. People have abandoned their vehicles altogether there, doors flung open and trunks crushed from impact after impact where others have tried to ram their way through. He’s upset, dimly and only when he stumbles in that direction, that he can’t wrap his head around how to maneuver through the chaos. There’s a trick to making those doors _not open_ , and he can’t remember.

That doesn’t stop him from stooping beside each one he crosses. He’s looking for something, he thinks. He needs to do this. There are thousands of cars, an abstract number when he can remember what numbers represent, but he’s looking for a specific one. A specific person.

When John sets his hand against the jagged, broken window of an SUV, he peers into the dark of the back seat. No light, no reflection, and yet he sees with perfect clarity the half-rotted corpse sucking down juddering breaths against the ruined leather bench. Their eyes meet-- the man lifting his broken skull just enough to look-- for several long moments. Eventually it slumps back down with a clumsy thump. John turns with an equally uncoordinated stumbled and loses both shaking knees from beneath him. Glass and metal and the fleshless face of a child hidden beneath a truck meet him all at once when his head thwacks against the asphalt. Distantly, he’s grateful for the pain. It means something good, floods him with fuzzy relief.

He blinks sluggishly and the face is gone.

But it’s still dark, albeit thicker. The flickering streetlamps have all burned out. Grass rises through the splintering cracks in the pavement, and John’s hands clack and scrape like stone against the street. It draws a nauseous shudder through him. Ridges and plains of bone have started to emerge from his peeling flesh, better mangled with each time he catches his decaying reflection in the dirty side mirrors and shop windows. Those moments, those cold shocks of clarity, strike him like a whip to the back. 

Monster. Ugly. Dead and deader by the minute. He’s sloughing off flesh with each rickety step, and he knows that soon he won’t be able to walk at all. There are a thousand, million, cars in New York, hundreds of abandoned military vehicles stationed uselessly around overrun rescue zones. Any one of them could have Alexander’s broken face cracked against the steering wheel, and he can’t-- another shudder creaks through him, breath hitching and kicking up with heat behind his dry eyes-- he can’t tell the difference between cars anymore. He can’t tell the difference between faces.

Bones and rotten flesh click and squelch when he stands, breath slowing and evening in stuttering gusts. He swipes the back of his hand across his eyes to catch the tears that didn’t come, and his vision flashes to black with a painful sting on one side. He lets that socket slip closed. That angry-hot despair washes out like a gentle tide from behind his eyes, cools as his mind drifts to sea. John wobbles towards the next car, red and broken. Its paint is chipped. 

He bends where the door should be and looks inside.


End file.
